Mamma mia, here we go again … Australia is back in the Eurovision fold

When Australia launched into the Eurovision Song Contest in 2015, we were a newbie country in the 59-year-old competition, where old-school heavyweights like Sweden, France, Italy and UK called the shots.

Nine years later, we are still in the fray and hoping to top our personal best score of second place (thank you Dami Im, back in 2016) with Electric Fields, an electronic music duo performing One Milkali (One Blood). Mamma mia, here we go again!

This year’s competition also falls on the 50th anniversary of ABBA’s 1974 Eurovision victory with the song that would become one of their signature hits, Waterloo.

The anniversary of the win was actually last month, but there was surprisingly little fanfare from the PR-savvy ABBA, whose Voyage album campaign in 2021 and 2022 proved they still know a thing or two about the dark art of self-promotion.

This can only mean one thing for the thousands of fans (and television cameras) converging on the south Swedish city of Malmö … something glittered this way comes. ABBA on stage? It’s a long shot, but not one beyond the hopes of Eurovision fans worldwide.

For Australia, the strategy has been a complex one. Im is our campaign-best result, landing in second place in 2016 with Sound of Silence. The performance was stunning for both its power and understatement. It had simple staging and, had Eurovision itself not updated its scoring system that year, Im would have won on the old metrics. A cruel twist of fate, indeed.

Dami Im performing at the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest.

Our artistic peak would surely be Kate Miller-Heidke’s Zero Gravity which, thanks to extraordinary staging, catapulted her into the heights of the stadium to deliver a dazzling performance. Backstage, the fear was palpable from European countries that we had a winning act.

But Miller-Heidke took a hiding from the professional juries, whose Eurocentric bias essentially undercut the performance that not only stole the show, it even overshadowed a rare Eurovision stage performance from pop icon Madonna. (To be fair, this was during Madonna’s eye-patch era, so it’s doubtful anyone knew what was going on.)

So, where to now? Australia has tried soloists and a progressive metal group (Voyager, who performed last year), and is this year returning to the fray with an electronic music duo, Electric Fields. The two halves of the duo are vocalist Zaachariaha Fielding and keyboard player and producer Michael Ross.

That means the big question might not be whether Electric Fields are ready for the artistic space of the Eurovision stage, but whether they are ready to navigate the complex line between the soft diplomacy of having almost 40 countries in a single space, and the cutthroat nature of performance when art must, at some point, give way to pursuing the prize.

“I would invite you to come and play ping pong with Zaachariaha and I,” laughs Ross. “We’re both Sagittarian,” chimes in Fielding. “And we have this beautiful, friendly fire when we play ping pong with each other because we hit that ball like pink punks, and we want it to fly right into that perfect back corner with a gorgeous amount of curve and spin,” finishes Ross.

“If we get that ace in, that is a hundred per cent our Sagittarian arrow, and if we don’t, we just give each other a hug and have a big laugh, because everyone deserves that gold medal, but we are planning on bringing it home to this continent for the first time in Eurovision history,” says Ross.

But the pair sees their mission as two-pronged. They have Eurovision in their sights, with a side serve of world peace. “Because of what’s happening around in the world, I feel like the job and being part of the Eurovision thing, our job as a collective with the countries coming together: it’s way bigger,” says Fielding.

“I do get the whole competitive side, but I feel like what the whole Eurovision thing is going to do is give some sort of special gift to the audience,” Fielding adds. “I think there’s going to be a lot of healing being sent out from the Eurovision this year.”

For some kids, particularly those who grew up with European ancestry, there was some childhood awareness of Eurovision that lays down their first understanding of its curious mesh of classical stagecraft, camp and cultural eccentricity.

But Ross did not encounter it until his university life when his friends would hold Eurovision parties. “I went to quite a conservative school and I grew up in a quite conservative environment, [and Eurovision] is the opposite of conservative,” Ross says. “It is full-throttle expression and all rules are meant to be broken, looking into a kaleidoscope of human expression. It was a magical eye-opening experience that just floods your spirit.”

Fielding, meanwhile, grew up in the bush. “So we never really had TV when I was younger, but when I got older and learned the art of Eurovision, it was like a Willy Wonka vibe,” Fielding says. “You had all the different types of candy and people could just be whoever they wanted to be. That whole stage is therapy.”

Fielding and Ross have been performing together as Electric Fields since 2015, winning best new talent of the year at the 2017 National Indigenous Music Awards, performing at the 2020 AFL Grand Final and, in 2023, unveiling We The People, the official WorldPride theme song.

Their Eurovision song, One Milkali (One Blood), incorporates Yankunytjatjara (pronounced yan-kun-ja-jarra), an Aboriginal language of the Anangu people. “We’ve always [incorporated Indigenous lyrics] because it’s a beautiful language, and it’s a part of who I am,” Fielding says. “To be given this opportunity with Eurovision … we get to be our country, and we get to showcase that.”

That move capitalises on a trend away from singing in English at the competition, which peaked in popularity in the last few decades. This year, Armenia, Estonia, France, Greece, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Spain will all be singing in their national languages. And Azerbaijan, Israel, San Marino and Ukraine will perform in a mix of languages, including English.

The mix of indigenous and non-indigenous language is “really embracing the relationship and the beauty and all the little surprises we learn about each other and being in the space where it’s okay to just express them,” Fielding says.

“When you come up with an idea, you can begin a dialogue with someone, and I love dialoguing with Michael because there’s no conclusion in the conversation,” Fielding adds. “It’s just like, we’ve got to investigate, we’ve got to look. We’re just focusing on what ‘feeling’ feels like and taking away the title of what you think you are or what society says that you are.”

The 68th Eurovision Song Contest, hosted by music Myf Warhurst and Joel Creasey, will air on SBS between May 8 and May 12. Australia competes in semi-final 1; the winning countries from semi-final 1 progress to the grand final.

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